I’m sleepy. My body is exhausted; I worked for almost eight hours, and have been awake a bit longer than I usually am. My eyelids are drooping down enough to compromise my vision. But my mind is wide fucking awake. I feel like I have to write something, anything, or else I’ll become lost in my thoughts and drop into a bad mood because I have nowhere to project myself. I feel like normally, my brain functions at, say, eighty percent. The other twenty percent accounts for all of my subconscious movements (breathing, blinking, fidgeting, etc.), or the times I let my mind wander into hazy scenarios that aren’t necessarily realistic. (I tend to daydream a lot, probably more than I should, and definitely in situations where my full attention is required.) I imagine there is a knob somewhere in my skull, maybe next to my brain stem, that is set at 80. And right now, it feels like someone’s walked by, accidentally bumping the knob with their elbow, and turned it up, past 100, to some unknown setting that isn’t even measured. My brain is thinking too fast for me to grasp everything; there are fleeting ideas and wonderings and feelings that zip by without being completely registered. And then some of them, I can grab a hold of, and keep for a few minutes, to write them down or say them to someone, or just think about and store in my memory so later I’ll be aware that they even existed. 

So, while my body is trying to tell me that it’s time to go to sleep, my brain is refusing with all of its strength, and how am I supposed to argue with that?